The English Paradigm in India Shweta Rao Garg · Deepti Gupta Editors the English Paradigm in India

The English Paradigm in India Shweta Rao Garg · Deepti Gupta Editors The English Paradigm in India

Essays in Language, Literature and Culture Editors Shweta Rao Garg Deepti Gupta DA-IICT Punjab University Gandhinagar, India Chandigarh, India

ISBN 978-981-10-5331-3 ISBN 978-981-10-5332-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-5332-0

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore For Dr. Rajyashree Khushu-Lahiri A Friend, Philosopher and Guide Preface

In Memory of Dr. Rajyashree Khushu-Lahiri (23 June 1959–3 August 2014) Dr. Rajyashree Khushu-Lahiri was a well-known scholar and a devoted teacher. We all remember Dr. Rajyashree Khushu-Lahiri as an energetic, generous and affectionate human being. Her students remember her for providing them with unconditional support and encouragement. To her numerous friends and colleagues, she was a valued companion, loving yet forthright. Her research output is tremendous and surprisingly diverse. As the Head of the Department, she was committed to building the then nascent Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Ropar. Her untimely death in a car accident in August 2014 came as a cruel shock to all those who knew her. She left a void which is impossible to fll, not only for her family but also for her students, friends and colleagues. She emphasised hard work, originality and attention to details. She upheld feminist ideals all her life. She had a penchant for learning which never deterred her from exploring new areas. She started off as a student of English, studying the canonical texts of English and American literature. As a graduate student, she was struck by the political contentions of Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak and others thinkers, and thereafter, she forayed into postcolonial literature and criticism. She was concerned about the pedagogic issues in teaching language and communication, especially after joining the Department of Humanities and

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Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. Hence, communication and ELT became her areas of interest. Further, her interest in communication got her working in pragmatics. The scholarship she left behind is engaging and diverse. The English Paradigm in India: Essays in Language, Literature and Culture is intended to celebrate the woman and the scholar that Dr. Khushu-Lahiri was. This volume seeks to bring out critical essays by people who impacted her work as well as those who were impacted by her. This volume celebrates the ideas she cherished and diverse method- ologies she abided by and worked with during her career. This volume is Gedenkschrift by her friends and students to honour the work she has done, and that she could have done. We are deeply indebted to Prof. Somdeb Lahiri and Prof. B.N. Patnaik for mentoring this book. We acknowledge Prof. Akshaya Kumar from Panjab University; Dr. Anshu Kujur from Miranda House, Delhi; and Dr. Hem Raj Bansal from Central University of Himachal for their valuable inputs. We would also like to thank the students Samriddhi Simlai, Dwimitra Chauhan and Rudra Chandak from DA-IICT for their support.

Gandhinagar, India Shweta Rao Garg Chandigarh, India Deepti Gupta Contents

1 Introduction 1 Shweta Rao Garg and Deepti Gupta

2 Comparative Literature in India in the Twenty-frst Century 7 Avadhesh Kumar Singh

3 Confronting the Canon Contrapuntally: The Example of Edward Said 31 Fakrul Alam

4 Debating, Challenging or Accepting Patriarchy? Assessing Indian Women’s Role in Society and Creative Writing 49 Somdatta Mandal

5 Social Imagination and Nation Image: Exploring the Sociocultural Milieu in Regional Indian Short Stories Translated in English 73 Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry

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6 Idli, Dosai, Sambar, Coffee: Consuming Tamil Identity 91 G.J.V. Prasad

7 Curfewed Night in Elsinore: Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider 101 Shormishtha Panja

8 Interrogating Gendered Spirituality in Phaniyamma and The Saga of South Kamrup 111 Jaiwanti Dimri

9 Resisting Patriarchy Without Separatism: A Re-Reading of Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors 125 Suraj Gunwant and Rashmi Gaur

10 Cultural Assimilation and the Politics of Beauty in Postwar American Fiction by Ethnic Women Writers 139 Nilanjana Ghosal and Srirupa Chatterjee

11 Agha Shahid Ali and Contemporary World Poetry 153 M.L. Raina

12 Critique of Normality in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree 167 Sanjoy C K and Gurumurthy Neelakantan

13 The Personal Is Political: Slavery, Trauma, and the White Man’s Legacy 185 Lekha Roy

14 Women in Diaspora, Stranded on the No-Man’s Land: A Study of Selected Works of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni 197 Deepti Gupta and Sumeet Brar

15 Food Images and Identity in the Selected Writings of Three Indian American Women Writers 205 Shweta Rao Garg Contents xi

16 Resistance, Resilience, Survival: Role of Family and Community in Jack Davis’s No Sugar 215 Hem Raj Bansal

17 Mediation of Multimodal Word Literature and Indirect Translation: Analysing The Adventures of Tintin 233 Urjani Chakravarty

18 Institutional Discourses, Technology-Mediated Practices and Pedagogy: A Critical Perspective 243 Atanu Bhattacharya and Preet Hiradhar

19 Building Reputational Bridges Over Crises Situations 265 Asha Kaul and Avani Desai

20 Observations on an Instance of Negative Interaction in Sarala Mahabharata 285 B.N. Patnaik

Bibliography 293

Index 313 Editors and Contributors

About the Editors

Shweta Rao Garg is an Assistant Professor of English at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information Communication Technology (DA-IICT), Gandhinagar. A former Fulbright Doctoral Fellow (at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) and Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize win- ner, she is also a creative writer and an artist. Her research interests include performance studies, gender studies and postcolonial literature. She con- ducts workshops on creative writing, theatre and gender sensitization. Deepti Gupta is a Professor of English and Dean International Students at Panjab University, Chandigarh. She has more than thirty years of experience in teaching and research with several national and international publications in ELT, linguistics and literature. She is a teacher trainer who regularly works with RELO, IDP and the British Council.

Contributors

Fakrul Alam is Professor of English at the University of Dhaka. His publications include: Rabindranath Tagore and National Identity Formation in Bangladesh: Essays and Reviews (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2013); the Essential Tagore (Boston: Harvard UP and Viswa Bharati:

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Kolkata, 2011; with Radha Chakravarty); Imperial Entanglements and Literature in English (writer’s ink: Dhaka, 2007); South Asian Writers in English (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006); Jibanananda Das: Selected Poems (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1999); Bharati Mukherjee (Twayne’s United States Authors Series. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995). His translation of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Unfnished Memoirs was published in 2012 by University Press in Bangladesh, Penguin Books in India and Oxford University Press in Pakistan. He received the SAARC Literature Award 2012 given at the SAARC Literature Festival of 2012 held at Lucknow, India, on 18 March 2012. He was awarded the Bangla Academy Puroshkar (literature award) in the translation cat- egory for 2013 on 24 February 2013. Ocean of Sorrow, his translation of the late nineteenth-century Bengali epic narrative, Bishad Sindhu by Mir Mosharraf Hussain, published by Bangla Academy in November 2016 is his most recent publication. Hem Raj Bansal has been working as Assistant Professor of English in the Department of English and European Languages at Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamshala. He has presented many research papers at national and international seminars. Having more than ffteen papers to his credit, he has worked for his Ph.D. thesis on Australian Aboriginal drama. His areas of specialisation/interest include Dalit literature, modern Indian/European drama, immigrant and diaspora writings, Australian Aboriginal literature, postcolonial literature and Indo-Canadian drama. He got the Best Research Paper Award at national conference organised by JCDAV College, Dasuya, Punjab, in 2015. He has also been awarded the one-month-long fellowship by Forum on Contemporary Theory in 2009. Atanu Bhattacharya is Professor in the Centre for English Studies at Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar, India. His research interests include technology, English language, and culture studies and their inter- actions with pedagogy. He is also an amateur theatre enthusiast. Sumeet Brar is presently serving as Assistant Professor (English) at S.C.D. Government College, Ludhiana. She has nineteen years of college teaching to her credit. Subsequent to her graduation with Honours in English, she pursued her M.A. and M. Phil. from Panjab University, Chandigarh. Her research interests are diasporic literature, postcolonial studies, phonetics and ecocriticism. A keen researcher, she has a number Editors and Contributors xv of publications in national and international journals to her credit and has also presented many research papers in seminars and conferences. She currently is pursuing her doctorate from Panjab University, Chandigarh. Srirupa Chatterjee is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India. Her research interests include contemporary and multiethnic American fction, literary and critical theory, and gender and body studies. Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry is an Assistant Professor of English in the Centre for English Studies at the Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. She has varied interests ranging from literatures of/from the margins, postcolonial studies, Australian literature and Sikh studies. She has been involved in translating from English to Punjabi and vice versa. She was nominated as an “Inspired Teacher” for President of India’s in-residence programme at Rashtrapati Bhavan (June, 2015). She is also an Associate at IIAS, Shimla. Urjani Chakravarty is working as Faculty of Communication at Indian Institute of Management, Indore. She has completed her Ph.D. in English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India. Her research interests include pragmatics, linguistic approaches to literature, multilingual communication and psycholinguistics. She has presented several papers in National and International Conferences and has published in the area of linguistic approaches to literature. Avani Desai has over 16 years of corporate and academic experience. She holds an MBA in fnance and a Ph.D. in the area of investor relations (fnancial communication). She works as Professor and Dean, Business Administration, at GLS University and as a Visiting Faculty at Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, in the Communication Area and MICA. She is the co-author of the book Corporate Reputation Decoded, which is the frst on this subject in the Indian context and has several international publications to her credit. Her areas of research are investor relations, corporate reputation, fnancial literacy, valuation, and employability and entrepreneurship studies in undergraduate management education. Jaiwanti Dimri a bilingual writer, translator and critic, retired as Professor of English from Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla. A former Fellow xvi Editors and Contributors

(2006–2008) and Guest Fellow (2015) of Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, she has taught in Nigeria and Bhutan under the aegis of Colombo Plan and has been Visiting Professor at Portland State University, Portland, USA, a Visiting Faculty in Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University, Verdha, and Doon University, Dehradun. Some of her publications are The Images and Representation of the Rural Woman: A Study of the Selected Novels of Indian Women Writers (IIAS Shimla, 2012), Sahastra Netradhari Nayak (Rajkamal 2009), a translated work, Pinddaan (Vani, 2012) and Surju Kei Naam (Jnanpith, 2006), short novellas in Hindi, The Drukpa Mystique: Bhutan in Twenty First Century (Authorpress, 2004), two short story collections Gagar Bhar Paani (Sanmarg, 2004) and Dusra Narak Kund (Abhishek 2004). She was editor of Summerhill IIAS, Shimla, journal (Vol. XIII, No. 1 & 2 2007). Rashmi Gaur is Professor of English in the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. She is the editor of Ice Candy Man: A Reader’s Companion (2004) and author of multiple books and research articles. Her research interests include women’s studies and British and Canadian literature. Nilanjana Ghosal is a doctoral scholar in English in the Department of Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India, where she is working under the guidance of Dr Srirupa Chatterjee. Her research interests include religion and contemporary American fction, American women’s literature and contemporary Gothic studies. Suraj Gunwant is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. His research project involves locating the decentredness of masculine subjectivities in Indian English fction. Prior to this, he completed his M.Phil. at the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, and an MA degree from the English & Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Preet Hiradhar is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She has a background in technology- enabled language learning, and her academic interests include online literacies and digital practices. She has recently co-authored the sec- ond edition of Critical Reading and Writing in the Digital Age with Routledge, and she currently researches digital forms of specifc community representations in online spaces. Editors and Contributors xvii

Asha Kaul is Professor in the Communication Area, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. She obtained her doctorate in stylistics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 1990. She is the author of Effective Business Communication (2000), The Effective Presentation: Talk Your Way to Success (2005), Business Communication (2nd edition, 2009), co-author of the book, Corporate Reputation Decoded (in print), and co- editor of two books: Management Communication: Trends and Strategies (2006) and New Paradigms for Gender Inclusivity (2013) and Corporate Reputation Decoded (2014). Her current areas of interest include genderlect, politeness, manage- rial, corporate and digital communication. Currently, she is working on Indian cases to comprehend the intricacies involved in corporate deci- sion-making for enhancing reputation. Avadhesh Kumar Singh (Ph.D.), Professor since 1993, was Vice Chancellor, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Open University, Ahmedabad (2006–2009). At present, he is Professor of Translation Studies, Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), New Delhi. Also, he is Honorary Chair Professor, Comparative & Interdisciplinary Studies, Auro University. He has been Director of School of Translation Studies & Training, IGNOU (2011-2014), and also Director of Indian Sign Language, Research & Training Centre, MOSJ&E. Somdatta Mandal is Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. She has lectured widely in national and international fora. A recipient of several prestigious international fellowships and awards, her areas of interest are American literature, contemporary fction, flm and culture studies, diaspora studies and translation. Published widely both nation- ally and internationally, she has published three books, fve volumes of translation, edited and co-edited 22 books, published above 90 research articles in national and international journals and anthologies. She also has over 110 book reviews to her credit. Gurumurthy Neelakantan Professor of English at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, is the author of Saul Bellow and the Modern Waste Land (Indian Publishers, 2000), in addition to articles on a range of modern and contemporary novelists. He serves on the editorial board of Philip Roth Studies. B.N. Patnaik taught generative linguistics, computational linguistics, English language and linguistic communication at IIT Kanpur where he xviii Editors and Contributors spent the most part of his teaching career. He now works on conversa- tional analysis, discourse and medieval Odia literature. He has published papers on topics in linguistics and Sarala Mahabharata. He has written the frst partial generative grammar of Odia, is the author of Introducing Sarala Mahabharata and Retelling as Interpretation: An Essay on Sarala Mahabharata, is a co-editor of Noam Chomsky’s Architecture of Language and is an associate editor of English-English-Oriya Dictionary. He writes a blog on Sarala Mahabharata : Shormishtha Panja is Professor of English and Director, Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi. She received her BA in English (Hons.) from Presidency College and her Ph.D. from Brown University where she was awarded the Jean Starr Untermeyer Fellowship. She has taught at Stanford University and IIT Delhi. Her seven books include: Performing Shakespeare in India: Exploring Indianness, Literatures and Cultures (co-ed.) (Sage 2016), Shakespeare and Class (co-ed.) (Pearson 2014), Shakespeare and the Art of Lying (ed.) (Orient BlackSwan 2013), Word Image Text: Studies in Literary and Visual Culture (co-ed.) (Orient BlackSwan 2009) and Signifying the Self: Women and Literature (co-ed.) (Macmillan 2004). She has published numerous articles on Renaissance studies in the international journals and collections English Literary Renaissance, Journal of Narrative Technique and Shakespeare International Yearbook besides several essays in Renaissance collections published by Ashgate. She has contributed by invitation to the Stanford Online Shakespeare Encyclopaedia and the Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre. She has been a Fellow at the Salzburg Seminar and a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and has been awarded a Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., USA, and the Mayers Fellowship at the Huntington, California, USA. She has been invited to lecture on Shakespeare in India and Indian Feminism in universities in the UK, USA, Canada and Australia. At the ILLL, she has created a MOOC, “The Renaissance and Shakespeare”, for NPTEL and overseen the writing of around 200 e-lessons and the creation of around 20 video lectures for the English Honours undergraduate curricula at the University of Delhi. She has been Head of the Department of English, University of Delhi, and Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi from 2005 to 2008. She has been President at Shakespeare Society of India, from 2008 to 2014. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the international group of Editors and Contributors xix early modern scholars, Theater Without Borders. She is also the founder member of PEHEL: Delhi University Women’s Support Group, formed in 2005. G.J.V. Prasad is Professor of English at Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature and Cultural Studies (SLLCS), Jawaharlal Nehru University. His major research interests are contemporary theatre, Indian English literature, Dalit writings, Australian literature and translation theory. He is also a poet, novelist and translator. His academic publications include Continuities in Indian English Poetry: Nation, Language, Form (Pencraft International, 1999), Translation and Culture: Indian Contexts (Ed., Pencraft International, 2010) and Writing India Writing English: Literature, Language, Location (Routledge, 2011). He is the current editor of JSL, the journal of the SLLCS, JNU, and president of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (IACLALS). M.L. Raina retired as Professor of English, Panjab University in 1994. He has been a Visiting Professor at Princeton (1971–1972) and Rutgers University (1972–1973, 1989, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995) and Visiting Fellow at King’s College Cambridge in the sum- mer of 1973. He received his Ph D from Manchester University, UK. He was a UGC National Lecturer and Emeritus Fellow. He has been the recipient of the following academic fellowships: Commonwealth Fellow at Manchester University, Fulbright-Hays Fellow at Princeton University and British Council Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. He has published extensively on Modern European literature, particu- larly on Forster, Joyce, Faulkner, T.S.Eliot and Thomas Mann as well as on Literary Theory and Cinema Theory and Practice. He has published in Journal of Modern Literature (Temple University), English Literature in Transition (University of Arizona), Journal of contemporary Arts (Manchester), Research Studies (Washington), Minnesota Review (Minnesota University), College English (Wesleyan University, USA), Etudes Anglaise (Paris) as also in Indian Journal of English Studies, American Studies Journal, Journal of Literary Criticism and other places. His works have been published in edited books published by OUP Macmillan, Arnold-Heinemann, Asia Publishing House. He has also been Associate Editor/editor of Minnesota Review and editor of New Quest. He has lectured at National Film Institute, Pune; American University, Beirut Temple University, Philadelphia; Princeton University and Rutgers University in USA. Memorial Lecture at Jawaharlal Nehru xx Editors and Contributors

University, New Delhi; and Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, Kerala University, Trivandrum, Guwahati University. Lekha Roy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, India, and joined the programme under the guidance of Dr. Rajyashree Khushu- Lahiri. Her areas of interest include African American writing, postcolonial and diaspora studies, cultural studies and literary theory. Sanjoy C K is an Assistant Professor of English in the School of Business Studies and Social Sciences, Christ University, Bangalore. His research interests include contemporary Americanfction, postmodern theory and literature, historical fction and flm studies.